Semiconductor detectors, due to their higher detection efficiency and better energy resolution, are widely considered, and applied to various applications of radiation detection, for example, nuclide identification devices, metering alarm devices, etc. in environmental radiation detection; item detection devices, such as item inspection machines and industrial computer tomography (CT), in national security; CT, dental imaging, positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computer tomography (SPECT) in medical applications. There are many types of semiconductor materials, such as CdMnTe (cadmium manganese telluride), HgI2 (mercury iodide), TlBr (thallium bromide), PbI2 (lead iodide), GaAs (gallium arsenide), Ge (germanium), and so on, which are applied to different areas due to their different characteristics.
CdZnTe (cadmium zinc telluride, abbreviated to CZT), in addition to its good energy resolution and high detection efficiency, can work at room temperature, which enables it to be a most promising material for radiation detection. With the CZT semiconductor, detectors designed in a pixel-based structure can be applied in a number of areas of radiation imaging, such as dental CT, SPECT and so on.